Successful entrepreneur is good at creating momentum around himself that somehow makes people believe this product is a game changer regardless of whether the product is ready or not. He just puts out whatever he has at the moment in front of people and start talking to people to understand what they think about it.

During this process he knowingly creates sets of initial fan base aka. early adaptors who bring another thousands of users in following weeks or months. Perhaps, I must say acquiring early adaptors isn’t good enough these days any more. You will soon realize by talking to prospective investors that you will need to acquire ‘paying’ customers early on. Otherwise, you are not on table to discuss with them.

Unfortunately, founders with technical background aren’t good at this kind of things. It’s still pretty rare that they understand importance of customer development at early stage unless they read books like The Lean Startup or The Startup Owner’s Manual, and exercise what’s written there by themselves.

Particularly, CTO type of person tends to spend too much time talking about things like architecture, framework, scalability, security and so on that don’t matter with acquiring ‘paying’ customers at all. If you are that kind of person, stop doing so. Start focusing on shipping whatever you have right now. I know this because I was once that kind of person.

Second advice to students: Don’t try to learn new way to produce things. If you are engineering student and already know how to code with PHP, don’t spend time to learn Ruby on Rails or Django or Express. Just ship Minimum Viable Product with PHP and verify your idea can turn into actual business. Then, start worrying about technical stuff.

Lastly, Startup Weekend is the best place to learn what I described above from forming team to keeping momentum after the event is over. We plan to have a couple of more Startup Weekend events in our local region and will announce them as date nears.

This is the result of our effort listening to feedback from our own users for months. In this web app you’ll that notice lots of features used to be there are no longer available. Part of this change is due to our re-focus to a bigger issue that businesses and governments are facing with excess of unused workspaces they own.

Coworkify is now an infrastructure to help these businesses and governments get the most out of these existing assets. Hence, we are more than just a coworking space listing service.

To talk about implication of this new web app and how it complements existing mobile apps, we must also talk about upcoming “wish list” feature that we plan to release in the near future.

A “wish list” is the place where users can vote for workspaces they wish to unlock. By having enough number of votes we believe it will be easier for businesses and governments to think about opening up their spaces since there is known demand up-front.

We understand this is a whole new thinking and requires some amount of education to venue owners. However, it will give huge impact to industry if it works.